999
by TheSingingGirl
Summary: David Tennant's last take was number 999. A series of unrelated oneshots, all about the Tenth Doctor, all 999 words in length.
1. Not Stupid

_A/N: A word of explanation. David Tennant's last take was number 999, which Julie Gardner (executive producer) got quite emotional about. "Call a Doctor," she sniffed, according to DWM._

_Hence, here are however many oneshots I can think of, all relating to David Tennant's Doctor, all 999 words in length. First up, one relating to Mr Tennant's last episode, and in particular his last scene outside the TARDIS, entitled "Not Stupid"._

* * *

**Not Stupid**

Rose Tyler was a lot of things. One thing she wasn't, though, was stupid. No matter how many times she'd been told she was.

Another thing she wasn't, or hadn't been, was particularly drunk in the early hours of New Year's Day, 2005. And Rose had rather a good memory when it came to faces. Chemical reactions, no. The imperfect in French, no. Quadratic formulae, no way. Hence why she hadn't just finished her A levels, and instead was anticipating an early shift in a shop on that first day of 2005. Didn't stop her remembering.

Later that day, and Rose was back in Henrick's, gossiping with Vicky, who also lived on the Estate and was temping for the Christmas period in womenswear. Vicky, it seemed, couldn't take her alcohol too well.

"I swear my head will never stop hurting," she moaned as they hung up the coats on clearance. "And I still feel like I'm gonna puke."

Rose grinned. "Yeah, well, don't do it over the stock. I am not covering your back this time."

"That was once! You're just not a partier like us, Rose. You don't go all out of control and just have fun!"

She didn't take the comment to heart. "Someone had to make sure Mum got home in one piece."

"Your mum can take care of herself. You know she came back about two?"

A green woollen coat slipped off its hanger, and Rose bent to pick it up, knowing Vicky's head would not like the change in altitude. "Thought she might've done."

"Thanks," Vicky said, taking the coat and trying to put it back on the hanger. Inside out.

Rose took the coat and hanger off her and sorted out the mess.

"Thanks," Vicky muttered again. "So, why d'you leave so early then? You see some eye candy?"

"Vick!" Rose protested. "I'm with Mickey now. Have been for months, you daft twit."

"And I keep telling you, that is so not going to last. He's bloody boring!" Rose tried to leap to his defence, but Vicky was already talking over her. "Where was he New Year's Eve, then?"

Defeated already, Rose sighed. "At home, watching the fireworks on the telly. He had work at nine the next morning!"

Vicky coughed pointedly. "Didn't stop us. So come on, there's gotta be someone else you got your eye on."

There wasn't , of course. "Sorry if we're not all into the four-timing scene, Vik."

"Shut up!" Vicky said, punctuating the instruction with a slap on the arm. "Look, don't throw your life away on Mr Smith, yeah? Keep your eyes open, girl. Bring on the great 2005 datefest!"

That got Rose thinking about what 2005 might hold in store for her, which in turn made her think of that bloke's prediction that it'd be a great year for her. Odd guy, now she thought about it completely sober. Didn't know the date, and he hadn't seemed that drunk. Bit ill. Okay, maybe he'd mixed his shots or something, but still. On New Year's Day, most people tended to remember the year.

And now that she was focusing on this little conundrum, she realised that she'd been reading him completely wrong last night. To her tired brain, it had sounded a bit like flirting, a promise to meet up again. He certainly hadn't corrected her when she said 'see ya'. But that hadn't been it at all, had it? He hadn't been coming onto her. He'd stayed by the wall, in the shadows.

"Oh, bugger," Vicky cursed as she dropped yet another garment. Unsecure buttons sprayed off, and the thought of the man was lost amid the search for this new health and safety hazard.

The key thing was that she had thought about him at all. And Vicky now reminded her of him. As did Mickey, through the connection with the conversation with Vicky. And so she never forgot that odd guy with the hair and the coat.

Few months later and she was off the Powell Estate, flying round the universe, soaring through time with a man whose face she would never forget. She saw things Vicky wouldn't have believed. She fell in love a couple of times. She learnt. She grew. And she didn't think of that prediction she'd received. There was so much to deal with in the here and now, wherever and whenever that might be.

But she still didn't forget, in the same way that she still remembered the face of her old gym teacher. Never thought of her, but if she'd cared to, she would've remembered.

When he changed, when he burst into flames right in front of her eyes, she didn't immediately realise where she'd seen him before. Why would she? It'd been a year, or she thought it might have been a year. And her Doctor had disappeared. Hardly the time to be thinking, "Ooh, you remind me of a guy I met once, for about a minute, when I was a bit tipsy on New Year's Day."

Even when she saw him in his new get-up, complete with the coat, she still didn't get it.

No, the moment Rose understood, she was standing next to the TARDIS, in the snow, in the dark. It would've been almost impossible to miss the similarities. She looked at him, and she remembered. And she remembered that he'd been alone. Alone, and in pain.

That was the point when she asked him whether or not he actually wanted her to come with him.

She never told him, of course. She had a bit of a horror of paradoxes after the furore with her dad. He would never realise that she remembered; it wouldn't even cross his mind. Busy regenerating and all. But one day, she would tell her Doctor, her half-human Doctor, and she'd shed a tear for him, and he would bow his head as he finally realised exactly why she'd been so desperate to find him again.


	2. Forever

**Forever**

This was going to be awkward.

Perhaps that shouldn't have been the prominent thought in Rose's mind as she stood on Bad Wolf Bay, her gaze returned to the place where the TARDIS had just stood, and yet it was. The problem was that Rose hadn't a clue of how to deal with this. 'This' being the man still holding her hand.

Really, Rose had no frame of reference for what was going on. Despite her travels to every sort of culture in the universe, and despite the hastened learning she'd done by osmosis, she was still human. She could comprehend being stranded in a parallel universe, because it was simply heartbreak. The details were irrelevant; in her human views and expectations, this equated to being separated, forcefully. No other facts needed.

This, though. This was totally bizarre. This time she still had the Doctor, who wasn't quite the Doctor, but was, and although she knew she loved him because he was/wasn't the same man, she was struggling to get her head around that, and still the first Doctor (she tried not to call him the real Doctor) was somewhere out there, in a different universe, without her.

How on earth was she going to assimilate that?

She thought perhaps she should say something. Apologise for the inevitable confusion she was going to be suffering in the next few days, or maybe tell him that she loved him, since she hadn't actually told this one yet.

But she didn't really love him in this body, not yet. She didn't know him. She did, but she didn't, and... oh, there was the confusion.

Giving herself a little mental shake, she tried to rearrange her thoughts. The first Doctor, the Time Lord one, said that the second one, the human one, was like the Time Lord one's previous body. Clearly, though, he wasn't. He'd responded to her mum's teasing about Tony's name (hilarious, not) for one thing. For another, he'd been grinning in the TARDIS, looking at everyone gathered round and flying the old girl. That sort of family gathering would not have appealed to the previous regeneration.

Not to mention that Rose would've destroyed the Daleks too, if she had a chance. There weren't many races in the universe of which she would support the utter obliteration, but she'd make an exception for the Daleks, for everything they'd done to the Doctor.

(And to her, but that obviously wasn't nearly as important.)

And she was supposed to do what? Fix him? This new Doctor, a human Doctor? That was the whole point of human nature, surely, that humans make mistakes. She didn't want to think about him as somehow worse than her, or worse than the Time Lord Doctor. Either they were the same person, or they weren't.

She would really have liked them to be the same, but she couldn't believe it. That kiss? That had never happened with the first Doctor. He'd kissed her three times in however many years, and two out of three times she'd been possessed. The third, in Ancient Rome, had never been mentioned again.

But this time... well. She may have initiated it, but she'd been the one to finish it, too.

This aspect of the new Doctor she knew she could get used to, but it just made it that little bit harder to reconcile the two men together. Her Doctor would never have done that.

No, not 'her Doctor'. The Time Lord Doctor. If either one of them was hers, it was the human one.

The one who was still standing right next to her, holding her hand and waiting for her to speak. Damnit, why couldn't he have spoken first?

"Sorry," she blurted out.

Oh, great start.

He frowned in confusion. "What for?"

She was committed to this conversation now, but it took her a second to decide. "Pulling away."

"Well, I'm sorry you did that too, but I understand," he said. "The TARDIS isn't exactly a subtle creature."

She hadn't even thought about that. The TARDIS always seemed to be part of the Doctor. He had a closer relationship with the ship than he did with her, or so it seemed. But more than that, the TARDIS was his... well, his everything. His home, his only reminder of his heritage, of his people. The Doctor was always at his most dangerous when he risked losing the TARDIS, or her, but she rarely got to see that. She was usually imprisoned or something at those points.

"You gonna miss her?" she asked softly.

He looked back at the spot where she had sat regally upon the sand. "Yeah," he said, simply. "But he'll miss you. Neither of us gets everything."

Rose made a little non-committal noise in her throat to avoid commenting. Her mind was too busy.

The way he'd put the TARDIS and her in the same bracket made her feel... she wasn't quite sure. Empowered? Perhaps that was the word. Never had she been sure of his feelings towards her, even though he had just told her, even though she had just kissed him. She was human, when all was said and done; a twenty-first century human girl, barely more than a child when placed next to his centuries of experience, of learning, of life. She'd never really got rid of the idea that she was something a bit like a pet, albeit a special one. A glorified dog, then.

(They still had the terrier at home, though it was now called Rosie to save confusion.)

Now, just in those two sentences, she was suddenly something more. Not an equal. Not in terms of intellect or experience. But maybe an equal in other ways, ways that her teenage self had struggled to see.

Suddenly, all her previous mental agonising ceased to matter. Because they had a whole lifetime to figure it all out. Because this time they really had forever, and 'forever' meant the same thing to both.

* * *

_A/N: Born because I've read so many awkward fics between the human Doctor and Rose, so I felt the need to write a degree of acceptance. Even if that only came in the last line!_


	3. Why and why not

_A/N: Half of this conversation happened in my strange little mind when I was in the shower this morning. At that point, it was going to go in my behemoth of a DW story, The Year That Never Should Have Been, lovingly shortened to TYTNSHB, or, as I've always called it, Torture. However, twelve hours later when I've finally sat down at my computer, it's got a whole different direction, setting, overlap and secondary character. *Grin* I've always wanted to write Donna Noble._

* * *

**Why and why not**

"Why did you love her?"

The Doctor blinked in surprise, drawing his concentration away from the garish Xeraboan landscape that was flying past. "Sorry?"

They were on a long distance hovertrain journey along the equator of Xerabo, the purpose of which being to get back to the TARDIS. The Xerabs hadn't quite grasped the idea that their teleport system would be so drastically painful for a human. Nor that Donna's resultant screams would be so drastically painful for their own eardrums.

After sorting out the consequent diplomatic incident, repairing the hearing of a few aliens with the trusty sonic screwdriver and of course putting all Donna's internal organs back together after leaving her safely in stasis for a bit (she hadn't yet forgiven him for leaving her there for six whole hours), the dynamic duo had been shoved on the slightly outdated hovertrain for a journey that would have taken ten minutes on any civilised world, but here would take ten hours.

Of course, on Earth it would have taken days. The Doctor's definition of 'civilised' was somewhat different to Donna's.

Four hours in and Donna was lying listlessly on a bunk, staring at the ceiling while the Doctor sat with his trainer-clad feet resting irreverently on the plastic table that seemed to be a vital feature on trains. The conversation had traversed the murky subject of Donna's forced homeostasis, of ways the Doctor could make it up to her, of exactly how he expected humans to explain away all the aliens they'd seen invade (and the several that she'd missed), and had drifted gently into a rare silence.

Until now.

"Why did you love her?" Donna repeated, shifting so she could stare searchingly at him.

"What? Who?"

Donna rolled her eyes. "Rose, you idiot. Why her?"

The Doctor boggled. "What in the universe do you mean: 'why her'?"

Inwardly, Donna made a mental note to avoid the word 'love'. Evidently, she would get much further without it.

Outwardly, she pressed on: "I mean you're an alien, she's a human, you're nine hundred, she's—what, twenty?—you're a complete idiot when it comes to seeing people care for you, she's... well, I don't know, I s'pose she might be exactly the same, but—"

"Donna, I'm the last of my kind," he reiterated. It never got easier to say. "There is no one in the universe like me."

"Yeah, which means that you can't exactly limit yourself to your own species. So why her? No, scrap that, why humans? You keep going on about how we're idiots and all that."

"You're genius idiots, though," he reminded her. "Obviously you're not as clever as me—"

"Obviously," Donna muttered.

"—but you've got so much that Time Lords never had. Look at you, asking me to save someone, anyone, from the ruins of Pompeii! And me, with all my Time Lord righteousness, about to leave them all behind..."

Donna sat up. "Yeah, but you thought you were doing the right thing," she argued.

He, too, took his feet off the table and leant into the conversation. "But I was wrong," he stated. "I know so much more than you, but I was still wrong, and you were right. That's what's brilliant about humans."

She took a moment to absorb this.

"Still doesn't explain why her," she persisted, stubbornly.

He threw his head back. "Why does it matter?" he asked in despair.

Donna shrugged. "It doesn't. Doesn't stop me asking."

How was it even possible that she could outsmart him by admitting she had no answer?

"Cos the way I see it," she continued, "you could have had your pick of the universe. Well, almost. I swear, even that Zerob queen one—"

"Xerab king."

"Yeah, her, him, whatever, was all over you! And you said Martha fancied you, and she's a lovely girl; she's brave and strong and clever to boot."

"There's different types of clever," the Doctor reflected.

Donna grimaced. She still wasn't getting anywhere, so she tried a new tactic: "Tell me about her."

"Who? Martha?"

"No, you twit! Rose!"

He sighed, and put his feet back on the table. "Rose Marion Tyler. Lived on a London council estate, worked in Henrik's, lived with her mum, Jackie; her dad died when she was a baby. She had no A levels, only a handful of GCSEs, including a D in Science and an A in English Language, she lived with an abusive boyfriend for six months when she was sixteen before he dumped her, and she'd only cleared the last of the debt he left her with two months before I blew up her job."

It wasn't the prettiest of pictures. Donna was about to say something to this effect, but then he spoke again.

"When I told her to go home and forget me, she looked me up. When I took her home twelve months too late, completely by accident, she never blamed me for the murder charges against her boyfriend. When we were trapped in 10 Downing Street, and I had to choose between the world and her, just days after I met her, I hesitated. When she saw that, she told me to choose the world.

"When I sent her home from a space station two hundred millennia in the future to save her life, she ripped the TARDIS open to come back to me. She pulled the entire time vortex inside her head. She became a goddess. She had power over everything: life, death, time. She _was_ time. And she said to me that she wanted me safe. She destroyed my enemies and saved my life. And when that was going to cost her hers, I died for her.

"Oh, but Donna... I travel through time. Even in my title, I pretend to have mastery over time. I pretend that time is mine, but the only truth in the history of everything, ever, is that time rules over us."

"How could I not love her?"

* * *

_A/N: So, now I turn over to you. Any requests for oneshots that could feasibly be 999 words in length? In case you hadn't guessed, I'm a bit of a Ten/Rose shipper, so that's a constraint, as is that it has to pertain to Ten. Other than that, fire away!_


	4. Toast Topics

_A/N: Because I've never written Martha before, because I ended up talking about this topic over lunch with my old head of year on a French train, and because I then had to excuse myself to grab a notebook and start scribbling._

_

* * *

_

**Toast Topics**

"Do you want to exist after you die?"

This, the Doctor reflected, was an occupational hazard of having students on board the TARDIS. Never mind that Martha was a medical student and as such should have been one of the typical science-y lot who thought everything could be explained neatly and logically, she was student enough to come up with completely random philosophical questions right in the middle of breakfast.

"Blimey, that's a topic and a half to have over toast," he said.

She shrugged. "Just popped into my head."

He looked at her, suddenly wary. "You're not religious, are you?"

"Course I'm not," she answered, rolling her eyes. "I've been here how long now, and have I ever mentioned religion?"

"You've taken the Lord's name in vain a few times," he noted dryly.

"Most people do," she defended herself, taking a bite of her Marmite on toast. The Doctor shuddered.

"And if most people jumped off cliffs..."

"I'm not a lemming!"

He bit off a large piece of his own marmalade slathered toast and attempted to answer around it. "Orsot. Eying artri—"

"Can't understand you."

He swallowed. "Course not. Lemmings aren't trying to commit mass suicide when they fall off cliffs. They just get pushed off by the crowd."

Martha rolled her eyes. Trust him to know something like that. "Wasn't originally the point of the conversation."

"No, it wasn't," he agreed. There was a brief pause. "What was?"

"I asked you if you wanted to exist after you died," she reminded him.

She wasn't sure where the notion had come from. Unlike a lot of students, Martha Jones was a morning person. This probably had a lot to do with the fact that she almost never went out at night. Consequently, her mind tended to wander near and far when she awoke, relishing the exercise and coming up with completely bizarre trains of thought, such as why it was that the word 'awkward' actually looked awkward, or perhaps whether her parents would have split up had they not had any children, or whether or not an afterlife would really be a good thing.

"Oh. Yeah."

He carried on eating his toast.

"Well?" she asked, a tad impatiently.

"I was just thinking!" he protested.

She rolled her eyes for the second time in as many minutes. It was a common occurrence in conversation with the Doctor. "Some of us don't have lifespans that can be measured in millennia, you know."

He looked at her seriously, now. "No, I don't want to exist after death."

She measured the look in his eyes. "Would it be too much to ask why?"

He shook his head round another gargantuan mouthful of toast. "Nah. I've lived for so long, I just want to rest, I suppose. I don't want a complete new life with the prefix 'after'. I don't buy into the concept of heaven. I wouldn't want to be confronted with everyone I ever knew. And bearing in mind it's death, you wouldn't be doing much, would you? I'd either die of boredom or die of guilt from remembering my life."

He said all this in such a casual sort of way that Martha struggled to remember exactly why he would feel so guilty. He was a plethora of contrasts, that man.

"I can't wrap my head round it, not existing," she confessed. "Cos even while you're asleep, you're still sort of there. Just can't get it, I suppose."

"It's an odd concept, I'll give you that," the Doctor mused.

Evidently he could easily comprehend it. You couldn't have an ego round the Doctor, that was for sure.

"They used to tell us those in college," Martha went on. "Like if the universe is expanding, what's on the other side?"

"Oh, that's a simple misunderstanding," the Doctor said. "You're assuming that there's only one universe. Add into the equation the billions upon trillions of parallels, and..."

He trailed off, for no reason that Martha could discern.

"But anyway!" he recovered. "It's simple enough."

"If you say so," she allowed, sipping now at a mug of coffee.

Medical students and coffee, now that was far harder to understand than what was on the other side of the edge of the universe. Of all the demographic groups to indulge in a highly-caffeinated drink too often...

"What about you?" he asked. "Would you want to exist after you died?"

She inclined her head in thought. "I don't know. That's kind of why I asked you. I mean, I want my memory to live on, but I'm not sure if I'd really want an afterlife. Especially if it's forever."

"Forever's overrated," he agreed.

He paused for a moment, and Martha got up to take her mug to the machine that seemed to function like a dishwasher, but looked more like a tumble dryer. How nothing got broken, she had no idea.

"I don't want to be remembered," the Doctor said abruptly.

Martha turned around, surprised. "Why not?"

He brushed the crumbs off his fingers. "There's a few reasons. For one thing, I wouldn't be around to defend myself from those remembering the dodgier of my bodies... But it's mainly because no matter what you might think of me, the majority of the universe wouldn't remember me fondly. Better to let them exist in peace without the memory of me."

"But what about people like me?" she argued. "This has been the best time of my life, and I wouldn't remember?"

He stood up to load his plate into the dishwasher/tumble dryer, not looking at Martha. "Ah, but that assumes that in deciding this, in my final moments, I'd care about anyone else." He turned back to her. "And I think, unless I've regenerated into someone completely unrecognisable, that for once I'm going to be wonderfully, gloriously selfish."

The terrible thing was that Martha honestly thought he deserved that.

"Very human," she commented.

He chuckled softly and shook his head. "No. That's very Time Lord."


	5. Love & Monsters

_A/N: This was a request from NewDrWhoFan, who asked for fluff based in Love & Monsters. Sadly, I've never been the best fluff writer, but judge for yourselves!_

* * *

It had been a long day, both figuratively and literally. Figuratively in that they'd met the Devil and both had nearly died, literally in that the Doctor estimated that Rose had got up over twenty two hours ago. Consequently, Rose was fast asleep in her room and the Doctor was… restless. After four hours of waiting, therefore, he had succumbed to the temptation to go out without her.

Normally, he wouldn't even consider it—how many times had she proved that he needed her?—but tonight... he just couldn't relax. The Doctor's greatest fear was captivity and stasis; he'd come entirely too close to that eventuality today.

Perhaps it said something that the house he landed outside was mortgaged up to the hilt.

* * *

Rose awoke several hours later to the sight of the Doctor sitting in her cosy armchair at the foot of her bed.

"You alright?" she asked sleepily.

"Me? Oh, I'm fine. More than fine. I'm—"

"What happened?"

She was sitting up now, rubbing sleep out of her eyes. He sighed.

"I... got bored. So I did a scan of London for hostile alien life forms..."

And so the whole story came out. The Elemental Shade, the semi-detached house with Mr and Mrs Pope, and their young son, whose name, inexplicably, was Elton.

"He woke up just as I was leaving. I left his father to tell him what happened."

By this stage, Rose was sitting at the end of her bed, cross legged, with her cloud of hair pushed firmly behind her ears. She watched him intently, and reached for his hand.

"You stopped it, though. At least you stopped it before it got to his dad. Or him. It's not your fault, Doctor."

He grimaced. "Oh, I know that. Not my fault it was there. Not my fault I was a bit too late." His grip on her fingers tightened. "But I was there. Call it survivor's guilt. I should have waited for you."

"Hindsight's a marvellous thing," she quipped gently. "People die all the time, Doctor."

"Yeah. Exactly."

Effectively, he'd killed the conversation. Rose saw that he would speak no more, and so offered the next best thing.

"Tea?"

* * *

A few cups of tea, some toast and a change of clothes later, and the Doctor and Rose were out running for their lives again.

"Right, go back to the TARDIS lab, and there's a couple of buckets of soapy water there."

"Soapy water?!"

"Experiments—trust me! Grab the... the... oh, it's not blue, anyway. Quick!"

He had already wheeled away to avoid the angry Hoix before she muttered, "Blue. Right."

* * *

When they eventually got back to the TARDIS, the Hoix safely tranquilised and being dragged behind them, they were laughing so hard that Rose could barely see to unlock the door.

"You said blue! You did!"

"I didn't!"

"Oh stop lying! I swear you're colour blind!"

"I am not! It's ages since I was doing those experiments."

"See! You admitted it, you said blue!"

The continuing giggles rather spoiled the resultant splutter of indignation.

* * *

"It was Elton."

Rose looked up from her phone, where she'd been flicking through something or other. "What?"

They were in the console room, Rose sitting on the jumpseat and the Doctor fiddling with... well, she'd never understand the workings of the TARDIS.

"Elton," he repeated. "The little boy whose mother..."

She cut him off before he had to say it. "Last night, yeah. What about him?"

"The guy earlier. With the Hoix. That was him."

She blinked. "What... how d'you know?"

He shrugged and came to sit down beside her. "Looked the same. Plus, it got my time senses tingling. Woah!"

Barely having sat down, he leapt up again and twirled a dial with a flourish.

"Nearly hit late fifteenth century Spain," he explained.

"What happened then?" she asked, distracted.

"Well, there was the Reconquista, Spanish for 'reconquest' funnily enough, the final winning of Granada by Ferdinand and Isabella; you know what the loser's mother said to him?"

"What?"

"She said to him 'weep like a woman for what you could not defend as a man'."

Rose laughed in shock. "That's horrible!"

The Doctor caught her eye. "That, Rose Tyler, is exactly what your mother would have said. Though she might have used fruitier language..."

Fifteen minutes later they had mysteriously joined the English delegation sent to see Ferdinand and Isabella's baby, the Infanta Catalina, who would grow up to be Katherine of Aragon, first wife to Henry VIII.

* * *

This was life on board the TARDIS. Flitting from place to place and time to time like a butterfly on caffeine, taking nectar from any temporal flower they so chose. In the morning running away from an irritated Hoix, in the afternoon visiting royalty. It was mad, it was rocket-paced, and it was fantastic.

* * *

For once they were able to return to the TARDIS in a leisurely fashion following their royal banquet, Rose still cooing over little Katherine.

"She was so cute!"

"She'll win a war one day," he told her. "Well, a battle. Well, she wasn't there, but a woman in those days essentially putting together and commanding an army, that's impressive…"

"And did you see her waving to that ambassador guy?"

The Doctor smiled fondly. She wasn't about to be moved on her opinion of this woman who would grow up with an unshakable belief that she was born to be Queen.

"Right, I'm gonna get out of this dress. How did they bear all that velvet and that in Spain? It's boiling!"

He watched her go, gazing at a girl who looked at once so regal and so real.

* * *

And that was how it was supposed to stay. Rose and the Doctor, the Doctor and Rose, forever and forever through time immemorial.

But when her mum called, crying, they agreed they'd visit more often.

Rose started looking for gifts.

She started saving her laundry.

And one day, she bought her a trinket made out of bazoolium.

* * *

_A/N: Any more requests? I've got no more chapters in progess at the moment, so ideas are welcomed!_


	6. Tyleerian

__

_A/N: I wrote this months ago, and haven't posted it before now because I feared upsetting someone. So before I begin, any Christians out there, I mean no disrespect. This is just a different viewpoint. For all I know, you're utterly right._

* * *

**Tyleerian**

"Mum, have you heard of Tyleerian?"

"You what?"

It was Christmas Eve on Pete's World, and Rose was engaged in the rather difficult activity of trying to explain to her mother exactly why neither she nor the Doctor would be going to the Crib Service that night. They were in the sitting room, next to an imperious looking eight foot tree; Rose and the Doctor had popped over to drop off their presents ready for the next day. Jackie hadn't let them go that easily, and so the three of them were here arguing while Pete was in Tony's room, trying to persuade him that opening presents a day early was not a good idea, no matter what he might think now.

"Tyleerian," Rose repeated. "It's a religion on the planet Saliu."

"The only religion on Saliu," the Doctor chipped in.

Jackie frowned. "Well of course I haven't heard of it, have I? We haven't all been off flying round the universe!"

It had been long enough that this didn't hurt as it might have done, which was the reason Jackie didn't shirk away from saying it. Still, Rose tightened her grip on the Doctor's hand just in case he was thinking of the TARDIS, and he did the same for her.

"Yeah, well, they're illiterate, so they don't exactly have a holy book or anything, but they do have a set of things that are sacred," Rose informed her.

"Yellow silk," said the Doctor.

"Root vegetables fried in oil," Rose rejoined.

"Dropping your aitches."

"The hymn 'Fix You'."

"Flowers with lots of petals."

"The mythological stories of a paradise called Urth."

"Oorth?" Jackie questioned.

"They got the pronunciation a bit wrong," the Doctor explained. "Was originally Earth."

"Earth," she said disbelievingly. "Where on… where the hell did they get that idea from?"

Rose grinned, a bit sheepishly. "Us."

"Oi!" exclaimed the Doctor. "This has nothing to do with me."

"It does!" Rose protested. "It was cos you'd been locked up that I started to tell them all this stuff in the first place."

Jackie was getting a little confused. "What the bloody hell are you going on about?"

They turned away from each other, back to her. "Tyleerian, Jackie," the Doctor said, "is a religion based on Rose."

Confused had given way to flabbergasted. "What?"

Taking pity on her, Rose began to explain. "So like I said, he'd been locked up for insulting this Saliuan's honour when he didn't salute when we arrived."

"Not a fan of salutes," the Doctor muttered.

"But they're really a very cultural and polite race," Rose continued. "If you don't know their customs, they let you off, no problem. I didn't know a thing about them, obviously, but he clearly did. So while he was thrown in jail, I was being wined and dined by these lilac aliens with no hair and flat noses. And they were asking all sorts of questions about who I was, where I came from, favourite song, favourite food, what my name meant, my accent, that sort of thing."

"Next thing I knew, I was being released because it was the Goddess's wish," the Doctor cut in.

Rose laughed. "They thought I sounded so exotic that I must be a Goddess. So they created a religion round me."

Jackie was still struggling to get her head round this, so she reverted to her original argument. "What's that got to do with the Crib Service?"

"Because I don't believe in your God, Jackie," the Doctor said. "I don't believe in any God. I mean, there are civilisations out there that worship me!" His nose wrinkled in disgust at this prospect.

"But you exist," Jackie argued. "Who's to say that God doesn't, too?"

"He might," the Doctor acknowledged. "If He's even a him. And I don't have a problem with people believing that God, or Rose, or even I exist. It's the notion of blind or undeserved faith that I'm not keen on."

He was a lost cause, Jackie knew. Still: "You don't have to be a completely solid Christian to come to a Crib Service. It's about the kids doing their nativity play, and singing carols."

"I know." He was completely impassive.

Sighing, she gave up and turned to her daughter. "What about you, then?"

"Mum, we never went to church when I was a kid. Only for weddings, and funerals. And anyway, there're bits of Christianity I'm really not keen on. I'd feel like I need to apologise for things that are completely right, y'know? Not that," she added hastily as Jackie's eyes flicked from her to the Doctor and back. "Things like… you remember Jack?"

"Handsome bloke who runs Torchwood in the other world? Like I'd forget him."

"Yeah, he's… well, omnisexual, I s'pose. Doesn't discriminate in the slightest. And that's normal, where he comes from. But the Bible basically says he's a freak who shouldn't exist."

Jackie rolled her eyes. "We're not living in the dark ages, Rose. Most people don't care anymore."

Rose snorted. "Yeah, right. Even if they didn't, I still don't want to go sit in a church and pretend I'm alright with what the guy at the front believes."

Jackie noticed that the Doctor was nodding slightly at what Rose was saying. She wasn't sure whether this annoyed her or made her appreciate just how sweet they were together. "Why are you celebrating Christmas at all, then?" she asked, reasonably.

"Cos it's a family thing, not just a religious thing," Rose answered immediately.

"And you don't have to go to a church," the Doctor added.

"And let's be honest," said Rose, "is Tony thinking about Jesus or Father Christmas?"

Knowing she was beaten, Jackie threw up her hands. "Fine!" she said. "But you are not getting married in a registry office in jeans and a t shirt, you understand me?"

Really, it was quite amusing the way they both blushed to exactly the same shade. They really were perfect for each other.

* * *

_A/N: Well, I'm still looking for ideas for this fic, so feel free to suggest any! And if I have upset anyone too much, tell me and I'll remove this chapter. It can languish on my hard drive where it can do no harm to anyone._


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